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Compensate History's Reel Victims

By

Joe Queenan

Updated April 17, 1998 12:01 a.m. ET

In James Cameron's cheerfully implausible "Titanic," first mate William Murdoch is portrayed as a murderer and a scoundrel willing to take a bribe to help a well-heeled villain escape the ship even though women and children are still aboard. According to Murdoch's distraught descendants, as well as the angry residents of his hometown, Dalbeattie, Scotland, this portrayal is a grossly inaccurate plot device dreamed up by the King of the World (Mr. Cameron, in case you haven't heard). The way the history books tell it, Murdoch took no bribes, murdered no passengers, and went down with the ship.

Last week, Twentieth Century Fox tacitly admitted that the film traduced Murdoch; the studio agreed to donate $8,000 to a fund commemorating him. In a letter to one of Murdoch's defenders, the studio's executive vice president, Scott Neeson, wrote: "Officer Murdoch was a decent, responsible and very human hero and should remain a source of pride for Dalbeattie, and in the memories of all who know of his life." In other words, Mr. Cameron and the boys got it all wrong.

Although the amount of money Twentieth Century Fox agreed to donate to the fund is piddling, the very fact that a major motion picture studio would apologize for its misrepresentations and take steps to redress the harm done to the family and friends of a victim is cause for celebration. Since so many distortions of this kind have appeared on film in recent years, Hollywood should set up a Celluloid Superfund to repair the reputations of innocent people it has willfully destroyed. The Superfund would clearly need a sizable endowment, if only to handle Oliver Stone-related grievances.

Recall that in "JFK," Mr. Stone exhumed the most repellent, idiotic theories about the Kennedy assassination, and went out of his way to lionize former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, one of the most odious public servants this nation has ever produced. In the course of the film, Mr. Stone completed Mr. Garrison's shameful mission in life by making it appear that a coterie of right-wing New Orleans homosexuals was at the heart of a murderous conspiracy. So the Superfund's administrators might start off by contacting any surviving relatives of the alleged ringleader, Clay Shaw, and sending them all checks for $125, plus a short note of apology.

When they're finished with "JFK," they should contact every innocent person either slimed in "Nixon" or related to someone who was, and find out how much money it will take to set things right by them. Better have the checkbook ready.

Another positive gesture the Celluloid Superfund might consider is contacting the far-flung descendants of Thomas Jefferson and issuing cash emoluments in recompense for the great man's mistreatment in Ismail Merchant and James Ivory's "Jefferson in Paris." Before the film was made, most people familiar with our third president had him pegged as an undisputed genius: the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence, designed Monticello, founded the University of Virginia, engineered the Louisiana Purchase, sent Lewis and Clark off on their great adventure, personally supplied the core holdings of the Library of Congress and generally took all the steps necessary to see that the country got off on the right foot. Messrs. Merchant and Ivory capriciously chose to cast the burly, coarse Nick Nolte as Jefferson and we were all treated to a zany deconstruction of the great man as a kind of oafish rogue--a Dixie ding-dong, if you will.

Since our children mostly learn American history not by reading great books but by watching bad movies, the Superfund should immediately move to establish some sort of nonpartisan foundation that will endeavor to restore the luster to Jefferson's tarnished image, if only by disseminating scholarly articles proving that Jefferson, unlike Mr. Nolte, would never have agreed to appear in a film with Barbra Streisand.

The Celluloid Superfund's work will not stop there. U.S. airmen may request a few bucks to atone for the damage done to their images in "Air America," an inane film about CIA-backed drug smuggling during the Vietnam War. Elliot Ness's descendants might solicit a smidgen of redress for the famed crime-buster's portrayal as a tongue-tied doofus in Brian DePalma's eerily dim "The Untouchables." And if any of Antonio Salieri's descendants are still out there, they might queue up for a few clams to erase the memory of his brutalization at the hands of Milos Forman in "Amadeus."

The Superfund must be careful not to spread its resources too thin. Its administrators must bear in mind that Hollywood has been defaming the honored dead for decades. The courageous and kind Capt. William Bligh has gotten a bad rap in at least four film versions of the mutiny on HMS Bounty, beginning in 1916 and climaxing with the coarse, burly Charles Laughton's 1935 portrayal of the hero as a sadistic taskmaster.

Messrs. Stone and Cameron are still relatively young men and will have many more opportunities to defile the memories of innocent, decent people. Once Mr. Stone gets cracking on the Martin Luther King assassination or Mr. Cameron decides to cast Kate Winslet as a nautical Black Widow traveling on the Lusitania, there's no telling who's going to get stabbed in the back.